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CounterPunch
November
26, 2002
American Journal
Total Information Awareness, DARPA,
the Free Speech Movement Revisited, Hitchens in Berkeley, Was
Merle a Maoist?
by ALEXANDER COCKBURN
So let's join Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition,
Logistics, and Technology Edward C. "Pete" Aldridge
at a recent Pentagon press briefing, where he's addressing concerns
about the Pentagon's bold new plan to have Admiral John Poindexter
personally review exactly what you bought in Safeway last week
and all the dirty movies you ordered up in Motel 6, last time
you were on the road.
Poindexter, you'll recall, is the bespectacled
seadog who, as one of Reagan's National Security chieftains,
instrumented another bold effort in synergy, later known as Iran/Contra,
which involved shuffling money and guns along the axis of evil
from Iran to the Nicaraguan contras in defiance of US laws at
the time. Poindexter got nailed for lying to Congress but was
later pardoned.
Back to Aldridge:
"We established a project within
DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency, that would
develop an experimental prototype -- underline, experimental
prototype, which we call the Total Information Awareness System.
The purpose of TIA would be to determine the feasibility of searching
vast quantities of data to determine links and patterns indicative
of terrorist activities."
Aldridge reeled off the TIA research
menu: rapid language translation, using computer voice-recognition
techniques; discovery of connections between transactions --
such as passports; visas; work permits; driver's license; credit
card; airline tickets; rental cars; gun purchases; chemical purchases
-- and events -- such as arrest or suspicious activities and
so forth.
What about privacy? Aldridge is soothing:
"We're designing this system to ensure complete anonymity
of uninvolved citizens, thus focusing the efforts of law enforcement
officials on terrorist investigations."
This is too much for one reporter, who
cries out, " How is this not domestic spying? I don't understand
this. You have these vast databases that you're looking for patterns
in. Ordinary Americans, who aren't of Middle East origin, are
just typical, ordinary Americans, their
transactions are going to be perused."
"It is a technology that we're developing,"
Aldridge offers by way of response, meaning that DARPA is merely
assembling the software package. "We'll have to operate
under the same legal conditions as we do today that protects
individuals' privacy when this is operated by the law enforcement
agency."
The press dutifully howled about Big
Brother and Orwell, which is perfectly fine, but which misses
the sad truth that DARPA is limping along in the wake of reality.
For most practical purposes Total Information Awareness got here
years ago. Police reports, criminal record, mortgage records,
credit history, medical history, former employment, DMV data
either lawfully or with artifice any competent private investigator
can get the skinny on you. Wiretaps? My local lineman tells me
that years ago the cops stopped even asking the phone company
for an okay to monitor calls. Try buying a gun and see how many
questions you have to answer.
I took a Gloucester canary to the Arcata
Animal Hospital the other day to have a cyst gouged out of its
wing, and was handed a form demanding not only such intimate
details as whether I fed my birds green vegetables but also my
social security number. Back in 1936 they said these numbers
would be secret and (so the late, great Murray Kempton used to
recall) Republican presidential candidate Alf Landon, campaigning
against Social Security, used to proclaim, "Mark my words,
that number will follow you from cradle to grave." He was
right about that one.
Not so long ago our friend, and CounterPuncher,
Susan Davis, a professor of communications at the University
of Illinois in Urbana, described how at work one day, she'd gone
to Amazon on her computer and ordered up a used copy of Estelle
Friedman and John D' Emilio's breakthrough book "Intimate
Matters: a History of Sexuality in America."
You can guess what the Amazon server did next. It brought to
Susan's attention a long and most unchaste list of books about
sex. But since she was writing a profile for CounterPunch of
Gershon Legman, a folklorist who was also a sex researcher she
skimmed these lists to see if there's anything she could use.
Up popped "A Mind of Its Own: A Cultural History of the
Penis," with enthusiastic academic as well as popular reviews.
Susan added "A Mind of Its Own"
to her shopping cart, browsed some more, placed her order, picked
up her papers and went off home. Her husband met at the door
with an upset look at his face. "You've just had an urgent
call from Capital One Visa. They want you call back RIGHT away!"
In Susan's ensuing conversation with
CapitalOne Visa, a young woman inquired whether she had just
placed several orders with "a bookstore, for items totaling
about $45". Susan allowed as how she had. What was the problem?
"I've done much bigger volume in a single day than that."
"Just a routine check," said the woman. "Is it
the content of what I bought?" Susan wondered aloud. "Or
is it that a few months ago I reported my Visa card lost and
had to get a new one?" Neither, she was reassured , "just
a routine check."
We live in the world of the routine check.
Vary your shopping travel patterns and the credit card company
is programmed to start asking questions. A national ID card?
We already carry one, known as a driver's license. Somewhere
I still have an Vermont driver's license from the l970s. A bit
of white pasteboard. No photo. I once offered it to an officer
of the California Highway Patrol, who gazed at it bemusedly before
throwing it on the ground. The cops have a battery of pretexts
they use, so that they can stop any driver anywhere and run a
check. Ask any black person, of any income bracket, how many
times they get checked driving across, say, Los Angeles.
Big Brother? Big Brother figured out
laws in the 1980s, enthusiastically passed by a Democrat-controlled
Congress, which laid the legal groundwork for imprisoning and
disenfranchising black people in vast numbers. When it comes
to social control, DARPA has nothing to offer in its quest for
total transparency except total confusion, which remains our
last best hope. Call it informational entropy: the more they
collect, the less sense they can make out of it.
How, as a Young
Man, I Experimented With Beer, and Other Terrible Confessions
Listen to John Kerry, one of the hopefuls
for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination, trying to cover
his ass in an interview with the New Yorker's Joe Klein. "I
knew how to have a lot of fun, sometimes too much. There were
plenty of times when I was disengaged, frivolous, four sheets
to the wind on a weekend."
As Jeffrey St Clair remarks, "We've
now entered a new age of Political Puritanism, where every presidential
campaign will begin with a tear-stained confession of drunkenness
and lechery in a former life, a month at Hazelton or Betty Ford,
and weeks or even years of sobriety. Since when did Utah become
a wedge state? Can you really win votes in Milwaukee or Pittsburgh
snivelling like this? Where's Wilbur Mills when we really need
him?"
Can't we just stipulate that all those
the popular mandate have at some point "experimented"
with drugs and booze.
Hitchens in
Berkeley
So what finally happened when Christopher
Hitchens came to the UC Berkeley campus to an event commemorating
Mario Savio and offered his habitual tirades in favor of dropping
bombs on Iraq? Mostly what transpired was an exercise of controlled,
unfree speech that would have been the envy of the UC authorities
Savio defied.
Here are excerpts of an account by Joseph
Anderson.
"I was the ONLY person actually
present last night to verbally protest Hitchens at the dog &
pony show, known as the Hochschild & Hitchens discussion
(interview), at the Mario Savio Memorial Lecture. And I know
there were others who strongly disagreed with Hitchen's selection.
Last night's program was a travesty and
a sham: a travesty to the memory of Mario Savio and a sham of
an exercise in critical examination of the issues of war &
peace. ..There was no other protest of any discernable kind regarding
Hitchens' selections, except for a 8-1/2x11-inch word processor
paper sign that Aaron Aarons occasionally held up reading, 'Hitchens'
Presence Tonight Insults Mario's Memory', and "Hitchens
Tonight, Bush in 2003?") Lynn Hollander [Savio] is totally
unconscious of the many ways in which she contradicts herself,
as well as the spirit and philosophy of her late husband (and
I think that is very sad).
" For all the talk about "free
speech": for one, Lynn Savio wouldn't even allow one of
the Mario Savio Award recipients herself, Harmony(?), from making
a brief comment (presumably about Hitchens' pro-war comments)
during Q&A about the proceedings. Lynn said that the Award
recipient herself could only ask a 1-minute question! Lynn also
said that no one in the Q&A line could make any statements,
but limited people to only 1-minute (token soundbite) questions!
So much for "free speech".
"In fact, since the award recipients
also made comments during their speech regarding war and peace,
and imperialistic wars, in general, and the impending U.S.-Iraq
war, in particular, they should have been allowed up on the dais
themselves to field questions from the audience too--perhaps
giving answers differing from Hitchens. Without any effective
way to challenge Hitchens on some of his lame pro-war assertions,
and with his ability to just cast off even more lame, and often
what passed for 'witty' (glib and fatuous), responses without
the possibility of informed rebuttal, I don't know why anyone
would seriously participate in the further pretense of Q&A.
"When I was making my verbal protest
at the microphone Hitchens signaled to Lynn that I be cut off--well
before my 60 seconds was upA friend of mine (Carla) said that
she happened to be sitting up front near Hitchens and she heard
him say to someone else that it was 'rude' for the award recipients
to be making statements against the war in Iraq (as well as other
"U.S. imperialistic wars"), given that he was pro-war.
"
Don't Blame
the Free Speech Movement
On November 21 we ran Michael Rossman's
account of how the leaders of the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley
failed to stand up for Lenny Glaser, aka Lenni Brenner. Set up
by UC Berkeley authorities Glaser was packed off to state prison
for a three year-plus term for possession of a roach. Responding
here to Rossman is Mitch Freedman, now chief of the American
Library Association.
"Michael Rossman is wrong to attribute
cowardice to the Free Speech Movement. He confuses the actions-'cowardice'
as he puts it--of the FSM Steering Committee with the body of
FSM. I'm one of the masses that comprised the FSM. The Steering
Committee never told us a thing about Glaser's arrest--and I
attended just about every demonstration. Had the Steering Committee
informed everyone about it, the outcome might have been different,
but then he could talk about the FSM's cowardice (or bravery)
depending on the whole group's action. The Steering Committee
wasn't the FSM--everyone who showed up at the demonstrations,
sat-in, and worked against the university's repression were the
FSM. Rossman can keep the appellation of coward for himself and
those on the Steering Committee who silently went along with
keeping Glaser's arrest quiet, but he shouldn't slander the FSM.
"Incidentally, Glaser/now Brenner,
was the first political speaker I remember hearing at Berkeley
during my years there as a graduate student, 1961-1965. I admired
his courage and indefatigability. He was out there day after
day wailing away regardless of how many or how few were listening."
The Antiwar
Movement in the 1960s
Not so long ago I decried the effort
by Marc Cooper, David Corn, Todd Gitlin and others to redbait
the current antiwar movement, insinuating that all the demonstrators
are dupes of Saddam Hussein, Ramsay Clark and the Workers World
Party. Corn went on the O'Reilly Show to reiterate his allegation
of dupedom.
Someone has to do the organizing, and
thus far it's been the Workers World Party, which doesn't mean
that everyone left the recent demos in DC and the Bay Area with
the WWP's secret plan for revolution burned into their synapses.
I pointed out that "It wasn't until 1966 and 1967, that
the left, particularly the Socialist Workers Party, managed to
stage the big anti war rallies that that broke forever the pro-war
consensus, and set the stage for more radical actions. And by
then there was that potent fuel for an antiwar movement, the
draft, which prompted Stop the Draft Week."
This passage elicited some interesting
correspondence, starting with a note from that excellent historian
of the left, Stew Albert:
Dear Alexander C. Actually, the first
big march against the war took place in NYC in 1964 on May 2.
It was somewhat covertly organized by the Maoist Progressive
Labor Party. Thousands marched from Harlem to the UN. And a PLP
front group, the May 2, Movement was born.
"The next big event. that I recall,
was organized in Berkeley in 1965 by a coalition of New Leftists,
CPers, PLers and yes the SWP. The coalition was called the Vietnam
Day Committee and its most prominent member was Jerry Rubin.
The VDC organized a massive teach-in and several very large marches
in BerkeleySDS jumped in organizing a teach-ins in Ann Arbor
and elsewhere and a big protest demo in DC. The SWP began showing
itself in a strong way in the later 60's but as a force more
moderate and experimental than Dave Dellinger's pacifists."
Stew added that my overall point "holds
up very well. If Maoists organized the event it did not create
a compulsory Maoism. Same with the Trotskyists. All these groups
helped build the peace movement. Though the great thing was that
a new left developed, that was able to work with them -and put
aside the anti-Red biases of the 50's social democrats."
So Stew was saying is that there were
anti-war activities before that, and some pretty big ones, too.
And that there were lots of other leftists involved. He is right.
No doubt. But, as Frank Bardacke points out in another useful
note, "the earlier demonstrations didn't break 'forever
the pro-war consensus.' It was the big, peaceful marches followed
by seven-and-a-half hours of speeches which did that. Broke the
cold war consensus, and nearly bored the movement to death in
its crib.
Other notes on Sixties history: Jeff
Cohen comments that "SDS was big in the '65 DC event. The
Pentagon protest in '67 was more counter-cultural, Yippie-types,
etc. Ed Sanders did the incantation to levitate the building.
In Detroit, SWP was at the center of all mass antiwar rallies."
And from Tim Harding, in a communication
relayed by Ed Pearl: "Dear Ed: The SWP in the US was extremely
important in building the anti-war movement in the 67-71 period.
Fred Halstead was one of the most important leaders at that time
in the mobilizations. Alex gives them too much credit, but they
had an excellent principled position and worked very well in
that leadership. This last week on the Lawyers' Guild program
on KPFK they discussed that period in the context of the Red
Baiting of the role of Workers' World in the current movement
and gave credit to the SWP for one national coalition and the
CP for another. SDS were important too but not by any means alone,
and mostly in the early period. As you know, the FSM was a regional
development and not a national organizer group. Fred Halstead's
book OUT NOW is a useful history."
And from Mike Klonsky: "Thanks to
Alexander Cockburn for the American Journal piece. The new respectable
neocons from the left were never really that left to begin with.
Even in the 60's, one in particular was hanging out on campus
with the respectable Young Democrats while those scruffy, long-haired
SDS students, left-wingers, commies and young activists were
getting arrested at the nearby Van Nuys Air National Guard base
trying to stop the bombers heading for Vietnam and elsewhere
in Southeast Asia.
"By the way, it's should have been
noted that it was the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)
who organized the first massive anti-war demonstration in Washington,
D.C. in 1965."
And Finally...Was
Merle Haggard in the RCP?
From a CounterPuncher: "This is
worthless as news, but interesting as gossip. I remember hearing
back in the 70's that various Maoist activists (RCP probably)
were talking to Merle a lot. Who knows what the truth was or
what came of this, but it's enough to say that Merle was never
the jingoist that his songs made him out to be. "Okie From
Muskogee" was a goof, after all, that became a big hit by
accident. I always thought that Fighting Side was a marketing
ploy, like those other lousy follow-up songs that pop artists
were constantly recording in the 60's. Merle is true to his roots
in an era when other country stars don't even have them. Go listen
to White Line Fever or Branded. That's the guy who wants to punch
Ashcroft in the mouth."
To which Dave Marsh comments: "does
ANYONE out there pay attention to the contradictions of populism?
He meant ALL those songs--and the ones he's singing now, too."
And this just in from Bob Morris.
Stand Down. "The Left-Blog blog
opposing an invasion of Iraq." This is a collaborative weblog
with about thirty weblogs from Left, Right, and Libertarian viewpoints
posting why they oppose an Iraq War and what we can do to stop
it.
The commentary here is excellent, quality
stuff.
http://www.nowarblog.org
Yesterday's Features
Norman Finkelstein
Counterfeit
Courage:
Reflections on Political Correctness in Germany
Jeffrey St. Clair
Adios
Jay Hair
A Corporate Flunky Passes On
Rep. Cynthia McKinney
Bush
and International Law
The Global Stick-Up
Dave Patton
Making Them Sweat
The Wal-Mart Action
Vincenzo Gonzalez
Life as a Political Prisoner in Colombia
Robert Jensen
Bush Puts a Contract Out on Federal Jobs
Ramzi Kysia
Malnutrition in Iraq
Bernard Weiner
Shining Our Light on the Shadow Forces
Anis Shivani
Joan of Arc Meets Che's Spirit
CounterPunch Available Exclusively
to Subscribers:
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The Persecution of Gershon Legman by Susan Davis: Smut, the Post Office, Commies
and the FBI;
- Reeling Democrats: Is Pelosi the Answer?
- Gandhi v. Hitler: the Secret Race for the Nobel
Prize;
- Sullying Mario Savio's
Memory;
- Lynching Then and Now;
- Earn While You Learn: Chris Whittle and Child Labor;
The Case of the Pompous
Professor;
- The Class Struggle in
Boston: All that
Effort, But What Did They Get?
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